1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a stereoscopic image processing technology, and it particularly relates to method, apparatus, system, and related computer program and data structure for processing or displaying a stereoscopic image, and compressing a stereoscopic image by reducing the amount of information therein. The present invention also relates to an object display technology, and it particularly relates to method, apparatus, and related computer program for displaying an object such as an icon.
2. Description of the Related Art
The number of Internet users has rapidly increased in recent years and we are now entering the age of the broadband, or a new stage of the utilization of the Internet. Since communication bandwidth has greatly expanded in broadband communication, the distribution of heavy image data, which has largely been neglected until now, is bound to become more popular. Although such concepts as “multimedia” and “video on demand” have been around for a long time, the situation has now arisen that for the first time general users can actually experience them.
When the distribution of images, especially moving pictures, is widely accepted, users will demand enrichment of the contents and improvement of image quality. Satisfying these demands will depend greatly on digitalization of the existing movie software, the development of authoring tools for such digitalization, the pursuit of more efficient and less lossy image coding technology and so on.
In this situation, the distribution of a pseudo three-dimensional image (hereinafter simply referred to as a “stereoscopic image”) has drawn technical attention as one of the styles of image distribution services likely to become available in the near future and it is expected that it will gain a considerable share of the market. Such a stereoscopic image meets the user's desire for more realistic images and is attractive for an application such as a movie or a game that aims at producing a feeling of presence. Furthermore, the stereoscopic image is useful for realistic display of commodities in commodity presentation in EC (electronic commerce) which will be standard in commerce in the twenty-first century.
However, it could be said that no infrastructure or models exist to promote a new network business on the basis of the distribution of stereoscopic images.
As a method for displaying stereoscopic images, a parallax barrier method is already in existence. In this method, right-eye and left-eye images are alternately arranged in a stripe pattern, and thereby a stereoscopic image is synthesized and displayed on a color liquid crystal panel or the like. Stereovision is possible when this stereoscopic image is viewed through a parallax barrier. Since stereovision is possible to achieve by such an easy method, a wide range of possible applications has been considered.
When a stereoscopic image is composed from right and left parallax images by a parallax barrier method, if the parallax images have the same resolution as the stereoscopic image, the original image used to compose the stereoscopic image has twice the amount of data of the stereoscopic image. In particular, when a multi-viewpoint stereoscopic image is composed from the parallax images viewed from over three viewpoints, the amount of the data increases in proportion to the number of the viewpoints. Therefore it is necessary somehow to reduce the amount of the original image data with a view to capacity of storage area and data transmission.
There is also such a situation that a user-friendly display technique has not been yet proposed for popularizing stereoscopic images.